Abstract:
Workflow management is a fast evolving technology which can support
business process reengineering and realize the full or partial automatic
process of a business. A formal model of workflow should contain at least
four major dimensions: the process, resource, case and time dimensions.
Although much research has been devoted to this subject, to the best of
our knowledge, no existing research is able to model workflow with the
four dimensions at the same time. In this paper, a formal model, named as
WF-RAPN (A Resource Assignment Petri Net for Workflow Management) is
shown. The model extends traditional Petri Nets with resource assignments
and case handling. To guarantee that resources are correctly consumed and
execution time of each case is soundly calculated in the modeled
processes, a formal set of WF-RAPN composition rules are designed and the
proof of the correctness is also shown in the paper.